Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication networks, and more particularly to utilizing feedback from a user equipment (UE) to facilitate transmit beamforming by a base station.
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as telephony, video, data, messaging, and broadcasts. Typical wireless communication systems may employ multiple-access technologies capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access technologies include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. For example, 5G new radio (NR) communications technology is envisaged to expand and support diverse usage scenarios and applications with respect to current mobile network generations. In an aspect, 5G communications technology includes enhanced mobile broadband addressing human-centric use cases for access to multimedia content, services and data; ultra-reliable-low latency communications (URLLC) with strict requirements, especially in terms of latency and reliability; and massive machine type communications for a very large number of connected devices and typically transmitting a relatively low volume of non-delay-sensitive information. As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, however, there exists a need for further improvements in 5G communications technology and beyond.
One area of recent improvements has focused on multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) technology that allows communication systems to improve the robustness of data transmission and/or increase data rates. Typically, a MIMO system consists of a plurality of transmit antennas at the transmitter and a plurality of receive antennas at the receiver. In one implementation of the MIMO technique, beamforming permits targeted illumination of specific areas in a coverage cell, which makes it possible to improve transmission to users at the far reaches of cell coverage. Particularly, beamforming uses multiple antennas to control the direction of a wavefront by weighting the magnitude and phase of individual antenna signals (referred to as transmit beamforming). As such, beamforming provides the possibility to direct the beam towards a selected UE.
However, in some situations, for example, when the one or more UEs are in idle mode (e.g., sleep mode) and awake only periodically to listen for paging messages, it may be challenging for the base stations to effectively utilize beamforming to direct a page towards a particular UE. Specifically, because the base station may not be aware of the exact location within its coverage area that the UE may awake to listen for the paging message, the base station generally transmits over multiple directions (referred to as a transmission sweep) in order to ensure that the idle mode UE receives the paging message. However, such transmission sweeps are resource intensive. The resource drainage of the conventional systems are further taxed when the base station needs to transmit a follow-up paging message (e.g., a long paging message) that may include a longer duration transmission, e.g., including a greater number of data packets compared to the initial page (e.g., short paging message), including limited identifying information.